We Must Be Brave Page 23

  We sat in silence, both facing the street. Then a waitress came over. ‘If sir and madam could share a table? We’re chock-a-block today.’

  We said in unison, ‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ and she tutted in disbelief. ‘Really, I am,’ I told her, but she’d already taken herself off.

  ‘People have become so rude.’ Gingerly he pulled his coat from his shoulder. I saw a sling and a bandaged hand.

  ‘Anzio,’ he said, and I nodded.

  Once I started looking at him, I couldn’t stop. I should forget about Phyllis Berrow, and leave. Just then he lumbered to his feet. ‘There she is.’ Mrs Berrow, laden with a heavy shopping bag, was pushing at the café door. She pulled a scarf from her head in the throng, gave a bleary glance towards the window and smiled at me. Then her eyes widened as she saw him, but she was tough and handy and she smiled at him too. ‘Goodness, it’s that young man from Plymouth!’ She jostled her way to the table and he stood and pulled out a chair for her. ‘I see you’ve already met my friend here. Mrs White.’

  ‘We’ve had a little chat!’ I said, in the tone of a Mrs White.

  ‘I can’t stop long, dear,’ Phyl said to me. ‘If you knew the errands and suchlike I had to take care of. You wouldn’t believe what a job it is to keep everything clean and respectable and make ends meet at the same time.’

  The same tame. She polished up her accent for him. I noticed even through the heartbeats pounding in my ears.

  I watched him rummage in his jacket pocket. ‘Here.’ He put three packets of cigarettes on the table. ‘I’m only sorry I couldn’t snaffle more. It was awfully nice talking to you that day. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything on the grapevine? In the locality?’

  A vigorous shake of the head released a thick curl of hair from her set. She cupped it back into position. ‘Oh no, dear, no.’

  ‘We met in a fearful crush outside the police station.’ He turned to me. ‘Poor Mrs Berrow had had her purse stolen. Such venal cowardice, in a war. And I’m on the hunt for a small missing person.’

  I could neither speak, blink nor swallow. He smiled at me and then addressed us both. ‘Well, I’m on my way, but may I get you ladies a pot of tea?’

  We, or rather Mrs Berrow, declined. He picked his coat up from the chair back, hitching it clumsily over one arm. As he put on his hat he bowed his head to me, locked eyes with me for a second, and then made his way to the door. I felt a pain in my palm, looked down to see my hand in a fist. I released my fingers to see four dark-pink dents along my lifeline.

  Phyllis stuffed two of the cigarette packets into her shopping bag and took out a box of Cook’s Matches. ‘Bloody hell.’ She lit her cigarette. ‘That was close to the wind.’

  I stared out into the street, at some young women whose thin skirts were being pulled out behind them by the sea breeze. They all turned round, clutching at the sides of their heads, to save their hats. Their screams of laughter were transformed into thin whines by the plate glass. My heart was sinking into the depths of my body.

  ‘What a mistake.’ I swallowed again. ‘An awful blunder. I was like a rabbit paralysed by a shotgun barrel. He knew it was me.’

  Mrs Berrow’s small blue eyes roved over the possibility. ‘Any road, I didn’t help him, I promise you.’

  The door of the café swung open, bringing a gust of wind. Bills fluttered from tables, chairs scraped. It was the laughing girls, in their skirts, patting their hair. Suddenly the room was unbearably full. I stood up.

  ‘Don’t you want to have tea, dear?’

  ‘I can’t stay. Goodbye, Mrs Berrow.’

  She grasped at my arm, a hard, sudden grip, as if she were in a heavy sea and I in a lifeboat. ‘Give that little child a kiss from me.’

  The blasting wind whipped at my eyes, made them leak. Like the girls, I put my hands to my hat. At the bus stops there was a milling crowd of children under the care of a single elderly schoolmaster. He funnelled them in through the doorway of the bus with a shepherd’s long practice, and smiled at me. ‘I don’t suppose you want a couple, do you?’

  It was astonishing how often people said things like that to me. You’re welcome to her, my dear. Have one of mine, I wouldn’t miss him. ‘Yes. I’ll take –’ I glanced over the flock ‘– those two boys there, the ones hitting each other with their caps.’

  He laughed in good humour. I imagined Pamela’s father saying to me, I don’t suppose you want her, do you? Keep her. She’s yours. I followed the schoolmaster into the bus. The children were sitting in their seats, if bouncing and jostling could be called sitting. The noise, rather like that in an aviary, abated as he held up one flat hand. ‘Lower Fourth,’ he intoned, ‘tacete, be silent,’ and they were. He stood aside to let the rest of the passengers on and I filed down the crowded bus. The driver was in a hurry: he lurched away from the stop while we were still on our feet. I staggered against the person behind me who gasped in pain. ‘I do beg your pardon.’

  I sat down and so did he, next to me.

  He took a moment to reposition his arm in its sling, and then smiled into my face. His candid light-brown eyes ran over me. ‘They bombed us in the Bay, you know. A hospital ship, and they bombed us. At one point we were fighting four simultaneous fires. That’s how I came a cropper. The surgeon in Naples dealt very well with my fingers.’ He gave me a steady look. ‘I’m not an idiot, Mrs … White?’

  A shade of contempt in his query. I blushed to my hairline.

  ‘Parr. Ellen Parr.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying in wait for you today. I had no idea that you’d come. But I knew Mrs Berrow would let drop some sort of clue in the end. She’s a slightly better liar than you, but still not very good. A little girl? Oh no, dear, I don’t know nothing about that.’ It was a fair imitation, gravelly, lower than his natural tone. ‘I told her I’d pay fifty pounds for the information but she held firm. I thought you might like to know that.’

  He was regarding me with a clear, benign, interested gaze. ‘I should introduce myself. Aubrey Lovell, naval surgeon.’

  So it was Lovell. Why not? A nice name, elegant. Competent.

  ‘Pamela thinks she’s called Pamela Pickering.’ My voice was husky. ‘That’s what she’s been taught.’

  His eyebrows shot up.

  ‘Yes.’ I swallowed. ‘Her mother called herself Mrs Pickering, you see. It was only a few days ago that we discovered this wasn’t right. So naturally we’ve been looking for a Mr Pickering all this time. Not a Lovell.’

  ‘You have been looking, then?’ He smiled.

  ‘Oh, yes. The police, the Forces, Wounded and Missing … why do you ask?’

  ‘Your face, madam. The sheer horror when you looked at me.’

  The way his lips thinned, even now almost mischievous. It was Pamela, and yet the down-curve of the mouth translated effortlessly into masculinity. I saw all this and struggled in vain for words.

  ‘I’d have found her myself, in the end. It’s simply a fact. If not now, then after we’ve finished with all this.’ He gestured clumsily at the battered frontages beyond the window. ‘Sooner or later the constabulary would have got round to me. How long must it be, now?’

  ‘Must what be?’ I was stupid, my lips numb, the margins of my vision dim. I wondered if I was going to faint again. I did hope not. That would be so embarrassing.

  ‘Since you found Pamela.’

  ‘Let me see. Three – three years and three months.’

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Parr?’

  The sunshine glanced along all the windows of the bus as we turned north. ‘I’m quite well, thank you.’

  The city streets seemed to stretch and hold us in their grasp. There were so many ponderous military vehicles; they swung out onto the highway and we gave way every time.

  ‘How did you know to go to Plymouth? You said you were estranged. You didn’t know where she was, did you?’

  Even to my ears I sounded odd, needlessly interrogatory. As if I were still testing him, as
if he might still turn out to be the wrong man. He seemed not to notice.

  ‘She wrote from that address, asking for money. I sent her some. This was at the beginning of the war, and we’d been apart for four years or so. Then I left England. When I didn’t hear from her I simply assumed she was in funds, or had found someone to keep her in funds.’ He glanced out of the window at a row of shops, half intact, the other half a smashed and blackened mound of brick. ‘God, what a mess they’ve made of us, the bastards. Excuse my language, Mrs Parr. I’m afraid we do an awful lot of cursing in the Navy.’

  ‘I don’t mind it.’ We were crossing the river now, winding our way through the battered city. ‘That was the entrance to the gasworks.’ I pointed at a blasted weed-run expanse in which a hulk of deformed ironwork had collapsed to its knees, rivets crying rust. ‘They hit Cold Storage. Did you hear about the butter fire? It burned for nine days. And the ice rink. The ice rink,’ I repeated, at the absurdity of it.

  ‘And so when I came back to England I went to Plymouth first. They told me she’d come here. So how did you end up with my daughter?’

  I told him about the raid, the fleeing buses and the well-meaning women. In my mind I picked Pamela up from the back seat, in her dirty blanket, and felt her hot cheek against the side of my neck.

  ‘What a shambles. What the hell was she doing in Southampton?’

  ‘I believe her mother … I believe there was a man.’

  He nodded, fingering his chin. That part made sense to him.

  *

  ‘Amelia danced before she walked, she told me. Born to it. She hated being still. She was ill with Pamela, bed rest from the fourth month until well after the birth. She grew … baleful. Blamed us both, I think, me and the baby, for hobbling her. She fell back in love with Pamela the minute she set eyes on her. Not with me, however.’

  Southampton had released us at last and we had travelled into, and out of, Waltham. Now we were in open country. He gave a sigh and stared out of the window.

  ‘We parted in ’thirty-six. Pamela was barely a year old. I came home from leave and the house was empty. Not so much as a hairpin. I tracked her down to a place along the coast – she hadn’t gone far – but it did no good. We divorced soon afterwards. She was happy to provide a corespondent. She said she was sorry, she knew she was to blame. She’d blundered. I was a mistake. And sometimes the price of freedom is higher than we’d wish, but worth it all the same.’

  Freedom. What freedom was worth that, tearing a child from her father? Sending the child out alone to wreak havoc? Because havoc she had surely wrought.

  He smiled. ‘To be fair, she was a good mother.’

  I found my voice, such as it was. A poor croak. ‘How do you know? If Pamela was only a year old when you left.’

  ‘When Amelia left.’ His correction was mild. ‘Do you have children?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘A year’s long enough to tell.’ He looked around him. ‘This is a pretty place.’

  And so it was, on a breezy late March afternoon. The high brick walls lichen-covered, the meadows well-watered, the houses with shining windows. One could hardly believe that we were at war.

  ‘This is Upton. We get off here.’

  I stood for a moment on the triangle of grass by the bus stop in the main street. Pamela would still be at Lucy’s house. ‘She’s in the care of a friend this afternoon,’ I said at last. ‘It’s this way.’ We began to walk up the road.

  ‘She won’t know me, of course,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m worried I’ll frighten her – with my arm in a sling.’

  He had no idea what she was like. How could he know? ‘Pamela won’t be frightened of a sling. When she was six she had one herself, for a sprained wrist. A cartwheeling injury.’ I stopped walking. ‘Is that all your worry? Not one question about how she is?’

  He turned back to me, stricken. ‘She hasn’t left my mind since I arrived at the Crown Hotel. When I see her I’ll know how she is.’

  We reached the steps up to the Hornes’ cottage. He went first, climbing in an awkward way, swinging round towards the rail. The steps were steep, and he had one arm bound to his body. By the time we reached the top he was breathing much harder than the labour merited and I saw the apprehension in his face, the pallor and wide eyes, and he looked even more like his daughter.

  Lucy and Pamela were in the garden, standing, both bending, and with their backs to us, in the long grass beyond the apple tree. ‘Maurice,’ Pamela was saying. ‘Oh Maurice, do eat your grass.’

  ‘My God, my God,’ Aubrey murmured at my side. At the click of the gate Lucy straightened up.

  ‘Here’s Ellen now,’ she said. ‘Oh.’

  Pamela came towards me, ahead of Lucy. ‘He won’t eat it. He’s a stubborn tortoise.’

  Lucy’s eyes flicked from man to child, from child to man, the rest of her face unmoving.

  Aubrey held out his uninjured hand to her. ‘This is my friend Lucy Horne,’ I said hastily, because she was taking his hand with a stiff nod and no words. Aubrey turned to Pamela.

  ‘Hello Pamela. I’m Aubrey.’ He pointed at the tortoise. ‘Is this Maurice?’

  Pamela stood, doubtful. ‘Beg pardon, but who are you?’

  ‘Aubrey. I told you.’

  She frowned. ‘Yes, but who is that?’

  Aubrey began to laugh, gently in delight. ‘I’m someone who’s interested in tortoises.’ He moved forward and stood in front of me, and bent down to Pamela. ‘Did you tickle Maurice on the nose? That’s the way to start. We need a long, juicy piece of grass.’

  ‘It would be nice if we could eat grass,’ Pamela said as she led him away. ‘It’s not on the ration. Everybody knows that. We could have grass buns, grass cakes. Grass lemonade. Look at your poor arm. Did you get bombed? Grass jelly. Grass …’

  It was liquid, like birdsong, her voice. They stood now where Pamela had stood with Lucy, in the wilderness beyond the apple tree. Except that he was with her now, and Lucy was beside me.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Ell,’ she whispered.

  We opened up the dining room, ran a duster over the walnut table, set out the pink Venetian glasses – a deep, lucent pink, the colour of ripe Victoria plums. ‘Don’t wait up for us,’ I told Elizabeth. ‘I’ll clean the plates and the pan while the water’s hot.’ And her mouth set in a line, the lips almost vanishing: disapproval of this idea, and pity for me at the same time.

  We ate a chicken we’d killed, the last of the kale, bolted and bitter, some potatoes. I cut up his portion for him in the kitchen but all the same he worked at his food. It was his right hand which was injured, and he wasn’t yet clever with his fork.

  Selwyn set down his glass with minute care, his face drawn. He’d listened to Aubrey’s account, waved aside my apology for not telling him about Mrs Berrow. That hardly mattered any more. Now he began to address Aubrey.

  ‘It’s simply that – well, here you are, without … I’m sorry, it seems absurd to say it, but—’

  ‘Without any actual evidence?’ Aubrey said mildly. ‘I know. I don’t even have her birth certificate. But I do have friends and family, of course, respectable people, who’d swear in court that I’m the Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Lovell who married Amelia Pickering, and that we had a child, a baby girl called Pamela.’

  ‘My dear man, I didn’t mean to offend—’

  ‘No offence taken. And then there’s my face, of course. Give Pamela a short back and sides and she could be me at the same age.’

  I put my hand over Selwyn’s, which was clenched around his silver napkin ring.

  Aubrey was reaching under his sling, into his inside breast pocket. ‘I’ve got some photographs.’ He withdrew a small brown envelope which he placed on the table. The flap was lifted. I could see that it was stuffed with photographs, too tightly for a single hand to take them out. ‘Mrs Parr, if you’d be so kind.’

  I picked up the envelope and began to pull out the photographs. The first was of
a baby for all the world like a small monkey, with huge eyes beneath surprised brows.

  ‘Here she is.’ He smiled. ‘More bushbaby than human being. She had a dreadful couple of months at the start, you know. She wouldn’t feed. That’s why she was so thin.’ More images slid out in my fingers. Pamela as an older baby, crawling. Now standing, feet apart, arms above her head, hands enclosed in the large fists of an elderly woman. They and a black Labrador were flanked by stone gateposts. ‘That is Ireland, County Waterford. My sister’s house. The lady’s her late mother-in-law. That dog I believe is called Winnie. Pamela was a year and a few days.’ He looked up at Selwyn. ‘My wife severed relations with me shortly afterwards.’

  I withdrew another photograph, and there he was himself, smiling, carrying a once more tiny Pamela, holding the hand of a woman in a cloche hat. The brim shaded her face so that only her mouth was visible. The lips were parted, black in the sunshine. ‘That’s Amelia.’

  The photographs skated and spun on the polished wood. They were so little and light.

  ‘I’m wifeless,’ Aubrey went on. ‘And a serving officer. Not to mention my injury. I can’t look after her, as much as I want to. Pamela will go to my sister in Ireland, at least until the war’s over. Hester – my sister – has four children. She was dreadfully hurt when Amelia left me and took Pamela away from us. She adored Pamela.’

  I might as well have been cloven in half with an axe.

  The meal seemed to be without end. We were now eating an apple pie, the pastry thick, the apples dark and wrinkled, no cream. Selwyn and Aubrey were talking about Egypt, Libya, Malta, Sicily. I interrupted Aubrey in mid-sentence.

  ‘I’d like to speak to your sister on the telephone.’

  He gazed at me, his face softening. My misery was too clear and too awful to ignore.

  ‘I’d like to hear her voice. Hester’s.’

  Aubrey nodded. ‘Of course, if it’s humanly possible. The lines may be too busy.’

  ‘I’ll make tea first.’ I pushed away my dessert. ‘Elizabeth has gone to bed.’

  I put the tea tray in the sitting room where the remains of a fire hissed in the grate. Aubrey was in the hall, speaking to the operator. He was consulting a small leather address book, cradling the receiver between shoulder and ear. The sight of him brought me some way to my senses and my manners. ‘I do apologize if I’m disturbing her. If I’ve inconvenienced you …’